Asus ROG Zephyrus S15 review: This portable spec sheet king demands a king's ransom

For the display, Asus opted for a 15.6-inch Full HD (1080p) IPS panel with a whopping 300Hz refresh rate.

The Asus ROG Zephyrus lineup has always pushed the boundaries of performance and design, defying the chunky form factor of gaming laptops of the past. And no other gaming laptop in the series exudes this formula more than ROG Zephyrus S15. However, with a starting price of Rs 2,34,990, the ROG Zephyrus S15 doesn’t come cheap. Our model, with its 10th Gen Intel processing hardware and top-end Nvidia RTX 2080 Super GPU, will set you back slightly over Rs 2.5 lacs. But at this high price, can the Zephyrus S15 deliver in the real-world? Stick around to find out!

The Asus ROG Zephyrus S15 features a magnesium-aluminium alloy chassis and an all-black finish. The lid has a two-tone finish with an ROG logo that gives it a subtle look without sacrificing the gamer aesthetic. The S15 weighs less than two kilos and is relatively slim, making it light enough to drop in a backpack and carry around. Asus has also retained the Ergo-lift Hinge design that raises the chassis off the surface, creating a vent at the bottom to improve airflow. The overall design and build of the Zephyrus S15 feel nothing short of premium.

The S15 features two USB Type-A ports and a single USB Type-C port on the right. On the left, you get a headphone jack, a microphone jack, an ethernet port, an HDMI port, and another USB Type-A port. The charging port also sits on the left. For a slim gaming laptop, the ROG S15 has a strong assortment of ports.

The ROG Zephyrus S15 has a per-key RGB keyboard that is fully customisable using the Aura Creator software. You don’t get a Numpad by there are dedicated Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys. The keyboard also has four dedicated keys to raise and lower volume, mute the mic, and open the Armoury Crate software. The keys are well spaced out with decent key travel to make the overall typing and gaming experience quite satisfactory. The touchpad also blends nicely into the smooth palm rest. It was quite responsive and worked well for daily productivity tasks.

For the display, Asus opted for a 15.6-inch Full HD (1080p) IPS panel with a whopping 300Hz refresh rate. Additionally, the S15 also boasts a 3ms response time and Nvidia G-Sync support. Asus has rated the screen for 100 percent sRGB coverage and 75.36 percent Adobe RGB coverage. The screen is also calibrated by Pantone, making it excellent for content creators by day and gamers by night. This arguably one of the best 1080p screen’s we’ve seen on a gaming laptop.

In terms of performance, Asus has made no compromises with the hardware on the ROG Zephyrus S15. Asus has equipped this elegant beast with an Intel Core i7-10875H and 32GB of RAM. The laptop boasts 1TB of M.2 solid-state storage – two 512GB NVMe drives set up as a single volume under RAID 0. Now, if you think that’s impressive, the GPU under the hood is an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Super with a power-efficient Max-Q design. Let’s take a look at how some of these specs translate to real-world performance.

In Doom Eternal, the S15 averaged around 170 fps in Ultra Nightmare mode. In Rise of the Tomb Raider, the laptop managed to hit 111fps on average with the settings maxed out. Far Cry 5 saw us hit the 100-mark on Ultra presets. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare on Ultra in multiplayer mode consistently hit the 120fps mark but dropping under 100fps more often than not.

This is what happens when you jump directly into multiplayer

Not doing the Zephyrus S15 Justice#NoobGoesPro@DOOMpic.twitter.com/HidRFqAC9o — Carlsen Martin (@Carlsen0491) March 17, 2021

I also managed to get 50 fps in Battlefield V on Ultra with DLSS and RTX turned on, although it does go up to an average of 90fps when you turn it off. Apex Legends managed to consistently surpass 150 fps with the settings maxed out. Counter Strike: Global Offensive and DOTA 2 (Both running on Max Settings) were the only games that got remotely close to the screen’s 300Hz refresh rate. I would recommend dropping settings to ‘High’ in Call of Duty and Battlefield V to get more frame rates.

#CallofDuty on the Zephyrus S15@ASUS_ROG#NoobGoesPropic.twitter.com/2S6Zl6wnyY — Carlsen Martin (@Carlsen0491) March 17, 2021

In my Geekbench 5 test, the ROG Zephyrus S15 managed a single-core score of 1191 points and a multi-core score of 7768 points. In Cinebench R23, the S15 scored 1167 and 8362 points in the single and multi-core tests, respectively. When it comes to cooling, the Zephyrus S15 uses liquid metal to keep the CPU and GPU cool under pressure. The result is a laptop that does an excellent job of dissipating heat and keeping it away from the keyboard deck and palm rest. However, the slim design does have limitations.

The GPU does tend to hit its thermal threshold pretty quickly and throttles either core clocks or memory to keep temperatures in check. There are definitely some performance hiccups here and despite the liquid metal, the machine runs hot, although a more improved cooling system will come at the cost of some bulk. While ‘thermal throttling’ may sound scary, it is nothing new in thin and light gaming laptops. And the Zephyrus S15 does it to a point where the lost performance doesn’t diminish the gaming experience.

One surprisingly impressive part of the Asus ROG Zephyrus S15 was battery life. When multitasking between browsing the web and watching Netflix, I managed to get a little over six hours of battery life. While multitasking between MS Word and Chrome, we got around five hours. I’d say that the Zephyrus S15 can deliver well-above six hours of battery life, which is quite respectable given the four-hour average for gaming laptops.

The Asus ROG Zephyrus S15 is quite a formidable gaming machine, despite its relatively portable form factor. There’s no doubt all this performance comes at a steep price, but as far as thin and light gaming laptops go, the Zephyrus S15 is as good as it gets. Moreover, the S15 also doubles as a decent productivity notebook, in part due to its good battery life. Not to mention, Asus has toned down the gamer aesthetic to give the notebook a more elegant look. And while the display is built for competitive gaming, it can still hold its own in content creation.

Given its capability, the only thing running against the Zephyrus S15 is time. Asus has already begun rolling out ROG Strix and TUF models with AMD Ryzen 5000 series CPUs and Nvidia RTX 30 series GPUs, which will undoubtedly bring better performance at a lower price point. So, I would recommend holding out until the Zephyrus S15 becomes available with the new AMD/Nvidia firepower or at the very least until this model gets a price cut.